Men, Women, and Money

More evidence this week that it puts a big stress on everyone when wives earn more than their husbands: it makes the husband unhappy, it makes both spouses feel worse about the marriage, and it leads to a higher divorce rate. The effect is fairly powerful and robust across several studies.

Why would that be? Richard Thaler has a go at dismissing the effect with a pop culture reference:

Yet another possibility is that many men seem to be clinging to a social norm from the “Mad Men” days: that the husband should be the primary earner in a family.

As if the economic importance of the husband's work were just a bit of faux tradition from the 50s, like diamond engagement rings. It is not. Uneasiness about money within marriage is another way of talking about two related and very important things: the terrible difficulty we have defining satisfactory identities for ourselves, and the anxiety created by the fading of clear social roles.

Over the past century we have engaged in a grand experiment in the steady erosion of gender roles, something that I think is unprecedented. For men and women to do exactly the same kinds of work is almost unheard of in the human experience. This is not to say that it has always been the norm for men to bring in most of the money (or food). On the contrary, there have always been societies where women's gathering or gardening or work as domestic servants produced more economic benefit than whatever their husbands were doing. But they were not doing the same thing. All human societies before ours had different roles for men and women, and therefore important things men could just about always do better than women. Men and women had identities, as men and women, that were largely derived from the work that they did.

Recently this has changed. Now lots of men and women work in the same places, doing the same thing, and it is increasingly common for husbands and wives to share the same career. What does it mean, now, to be a man or a woman? About the only difference left is that only women can bear babies. Which, of course, defines masculinity not by what men can do but by what they can't.

So the rise of two-income households is another facet of the fading of patriarchy and consequent declining status of men. What is special now about being a man? Not much. The decline of the professions that traditionally made up men's work -- farming, logging, fishing, pretty much all the old male jobs except construction -- and the rise of office drudgery is another part of this change, removing from our lives the macho elements of work. Without danger, physical effort, and so on, work is a less masculine thing and more a gender-neutral way to earn cash. Which puts the emphasis squarely on the amount of that cash, turning how much money you earn into a key measure of how much of a man you are.

But I think the fading of traditional gender roles is even more important in another way. The family structure established in the Victorian period, with a man who worked outside the home for cash and a woman who bore children and tended to the home front, is still very powerful for us. Why? Well, why is any social norm powerful? Because most people need them. It is just too hard to make everything up as you go along, so most people structure their lives the way everyone around them does. (Those who don't usually aren't making it up either, but just doing the opposite of everyone else.) The Victorian family gave everyone a well-defined role, a way of acting, a path through life, even a set of virtues and vices.

What are those norms now? We still have them, obviously, but we also have many more fundamental choices to make. Whether to have children, for example. And women who do have children then face the choice of how much to work: full time? part time? not at all? What does it mean to be a good wife, or a good mother? And what does it mean to be a good husband? In our society money matters very much to any question of success or failure, and especially so for husbands. Being a good husband -- or a good man, for that matter -- means earning enough money. How much is enough? Well, compare your salary to those of the people around you: your neighbors, your high school classmates, the other people in your office. How do you compare? And how do you compare to the person you share your house with?

The older I get, the more I believe that identity is everything. What matters most to us is the things that define who we are. Our society offers very few rewards other than money, so of course how much you have is a key part of how we define ourselves.